For those contemplating pursuing a search fund, or investing in one, the CES has created a practical guide to answer the most frequently asked questions. The Primer aims to provide an unbiased view of the benefits and challenges, explains the model from the entrepreneurs' and investors' perspective, and gives many operational and execution tips from previous search fund entrepreneurs.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson is well known in tech circles for his regular blogging and free advice. He's just wrapped up his "MBA Mondays" series, and it's full of good advice for those looking to start their own business, tech or otherwise.

Wilson basically covers all the questions that an investor, a consultant, or an accountant would ask a business owner to answer in founding and running their company. It's an overview of the kind of courses they teach in basic accounting or business courses at college, but written with a far less stern and academic tone. In The Balance Sheet, for example, Wilson explains the most important items on a balance sheet and how the numbers fit together, even running some quick numbers on Google's balance sheet. Less math-y topics, like forecasting and marketing, are also covered. [Lifehacker Annotation]

Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank usually hears the “Should I get my MBA?” question at least once a month. Here's his answer for those interested in entrepreneurship.

Although entrepreneurs provide the majority of jobs in the United States, little is known about what makes them tick. The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur fills in some gaps by providing insights into high-growth founders' motivations, their socio-economic, educational, and familial backgrounds, as well as their views on the factors determining the success of start-ups.

A team of researchers led by Vivek Wadhwa of Duke University, Raj Aggarwal of the University of Akron, Krisztina Holly of the University of Southern California, and Alex Salkever of Duke University surveyed 549 company founders of successful businesses in high-growth industries, including aerospace, defense, computing, electronics, and health care.

A major new study involving some 3,500 executives has highlighted the key skills that innovative and creative entrepreneurs need to develop. The six-year-long research into disruptive innovation by INSEAD professor Hal Gregersen, Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Clayton Christensen of Harvard, outlines five 'discovery' skills you need. But, says Gregersen, you don’t have to be ‘great in everything.’

There are no guarantees when it comes to running a business. But the best entrepreneurs I know follow these guidelines.

Should you join the millions of people every year who take the plunge and start their first ventures? Developed by Babson College professor Daniel Isenberg, this 20-question quiz on HBR.org takes just a few minutes to complete and might help you decide.

Venkatesh Rao tries to turn the lean startup conversation, anchored by Steve Blank’s book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, into a self-administered inquisition. He offers a test, a round-up of the lean startup conversation, and a micro-riff on applying this to your life

Venture capitalist Brad Feld counts four different standardized seed financing documents floating around the industry (click through for links to each) and would like to see that consolidate to one truly standardize set. Thus, he has decided to try to get a handful of lawyers in a room and try to come out with one set of documents. Who knows if he will succeed but bravo for the effort.

Over the past ten years, the OECD has addressed entrepreneurship issues in various analyses and reports. While these studies compiled relevant data to support specific research or policy tasks, no effort was made to establish an ongoing database of entrepreneurship across OECD countries. In 2004, the 2nd OECD Ministerial Conference on SMEs in Istanbul, “Promoting Entrepreneurship and Innovative SMEs in a Global Economy”, concluded that the statistical base for entrepreneurship research was weak and urged the OECD to develop “a robust and comparable statistical base on which SME policy can be developed”.

In 2005, the Kauffman Foundation provided the OECD the financial support for a feasibility study to explore what could be done to improve entrepreneurship data.

Encouraged by the feasibility study, the OECD launched the Entrepreneurship Indicators Programme (EIP) in 2006 in order to build internationally comparable statistics on entrepreneurship and its determinants. In 2007, Eurostat joined forces with the OECD to create a joint OECD-Eurostat EIP, and work began with the development of standard definitions and concepts as a basis for the collection of empirical data.

This report presents the results of the second round of empirical data collected under the EIP.

Raj Kapoor gives entreprenuers advice on how to pitch VCs. Kapoor knows both sides of the equation. For the past five years, he’s been a VC at the Mayfield Fund. Before that he founded the photo site Snapfish, which he sold to Hewlett-Packard.

Roger Ehrenberg attempts to answer a fundamental question for entrepreneurs: whether or not to take venture money, and if so, from whom?

TechCrunch gives an overview of and link to a new basic term sheet for use by investors and founders, authored by Adeo Ressi, founder of The Funded, a site where people rate venture capitalists .

"Startup 101" is a serialized book about the thrills and spills of starting a Web technology venture. Startup 101 is for first-time entrepreneurs who want to go through the whole startup life cycle - including raising money, building a valuable business, and making a lot of money by selling the venture or taking it public.

This series is designed for Web technology startups. But if you are building a clean tech, bio tech, outsourcing, hardware, or other type of technology venture, we hope some of Startup 101 will be useful to you, too.

Startup 101 is designed for those "shoot for the moon," high-trajectory ventures. Some of the early posts/chapters will help you decide whether this really is what you want to do. It is certainly not for everyone.

We will also explore options for building smaller, slower-growth ventures, using less money and with less of a need to seek an early exit. Our aim is to help you think through what is right for you and your venture and then to build and execute a plan that is appropriate for that decision. The third chapter/post, "What Kind of Startup Do You Want to Be?," focuses on that decision.

We'll try as much as possible to follow the chronology of a typical venture. So, the first chapter/post is "10 Things to Be Clear About Before You Start," and the final chapter/post is "Congratulations! What's Next?" (for when you've received the wire transfer and have started celebrating the sale of your venture). But we recognize that not every venture follows the same trajectory and that yours will follow its own order.

Paul Graham offers startups 13 pieces of advice.

Employment growth is strongly predicted by smaller average establishment size, both across cities and across industries within cities, but there is little consensus on why this relationship exists. Traditional economic explanations emphasize factors that reduce entry costs or raise entrepreneurial returns, thereby increasing net returns and attracting entrepreneurs. A second class of theories hypothesizes that some places are endowed with a greater supply of entrepreneurship. Evidence on sales per worker does not support the higher returns for entrepreneurship rationale. Our evidence suggests that entrepreneurship is higher when fixed costs are lower and when there are more entrepreneurial people.

VCs are good at asking questions. They are unimplicated in your dumb decisions, unmoved by your original sense of mission and far less concerned than you that a blunder could bankrupt you. They re-imagine your business in terms of all the other businesses they’ve seen, pulling the arms off one doll and the head off another to create a perfect money-making Frankenstein. And since the stakes are high, the whole philosophical exercise tends to result in action. Here are the questions VCs asked Redfin that changed how we think about our business.

Are you an entrepreneur who has been seduced by social media tools such as Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook? If so, you may realize the benefits of displaying your resume, finding and staying in touch with business partners, employers and customers, and learning new information through these basic tools.

If you don’t use a variety of basic social media tools for networking, then you’ll learn a few below. Then, we offer a variety of social media sites designed just for entrepreneurs. Through these sites, you can network, build a Web presence, place ads, find funding and more – all needs required by the entrepreneurial soul.

VCs have an unfair advantage when it comes to financings. They simply have more experience doing deals.

One area that has always struck me where this asymmetrical relationship comes into sharp focus is when there's a discussion around the price of the deal. Entrepreneurs often mistakenly focus solely on the pre-money valuation while VCs look at multiple knobs in the negotiation to drive to a set of terms that, in total, they find acceptable. And if they don't focus on the pre-money, they focus on their ownership position after the financing, irrespecive of the amount of capital that was raised.

In my partnership, we've come up with a new term (I think it's new - I don't see it written or talked about much) called the "promote" to help communicate with entrepreneurs the real value behind a particular deal so get them to step back from concentrating only on the pre-money valuation or post-money ownership.

Some entrepreneurs may not be familiar with raising institutional capital to grow their businesses. Expansion plans beyond common organic growth are typically dependent on personal investments from company founders, friends, family, and occasionally from banks or the government.

Even in regions where it was once scarce, venture capital (VC) is becoming a more important option to raise new money – especially in high growth sectors such as technology. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs do not know how to present an investment opportunity to institutional investors or what to expect from them aside from their financial investment.

Intel Capital, Intel's global investment organization, is one of the largest corporate venture programs investing in the technology segment. Its experience has shown that during the analysis and negotiation phases, entrepreneurs often have questions regarding the practices of Intel Capital and other potential co-investors.

In an effort to help explain this way of doing business, Intel Capital has put together a partial checklist as well as some explanatory discussion. While incomplete, this may help offer some guidance on the decisions and preparation prior to approaching investors with a proposal.

Mark Suster of GRP Partners in LA offers a useful article on getting access to venture capitalists.

Venture capitalist, consultant and former Apple software "evangelist" Guy Kawasaki talked about "the art of innovation" during a recent visit to the University of Pennsylvania. He offered 10 rules for entrepreneurs and innovators.

While most people have never heard of them, search funds are attracting increasing attention as a way for small businesses to beat the usual odds of success, even in the midst of a deepening recession.

Endless articles, books, and blogs have been written on the topic of business plan presentations and pitching to investors. In spite of this wealth of advice, almost every entrepreneur gets it wrong. Why? Because most guides to pitching your company miss the central point: The purpose of your pitch is to sell, not to teach. Your job is to excite, not to educate.

To win over the hearts and minds of investors, your pitch has to accomplish three things:
* Tell a good, clear, easy-to-repeat story—the story of an exciting new startup.
* Position your company as a perfect fit with other investments the investors have made and their firm is chartered to make.
* Beat out the other new investments the firm is currently considering.

These latter two issues are beyond the scope of this modest guide. So for now, let’s just concentrate on telling a good story.

Sim Simeonov from Polaris Venture Partners shares some of his thoughts on how VC’s engage with executive summaries. [Hat tip to Brad Feld]